Will Blu-ray and PSP be friends this year?

I was thinking about this over the weekend, and how we haven’t heard anything more on this. I did a story about this back in Jan 07. Will this just be a firmware upgrade or will the blu-ray discs need to have those portable files on it? Also has Sony completely forgot about this cool feature?? This would be a big boost for blu-ray I think. Being able to watch blu-ray movies on the go with the PSP, iPhone, or other media devices. Of course piracy is a issue, but hopefully they find a way to prevent that.

Sony Pictures Entertainment will include portable files on Blu-Ray DVDs that can be transferred without a download. Sony may add the feature this year. It’s not currently part of anything on our current release schedule, but we’ll probably roll it out sometime this year.

It sounds like a cool idea, but I wouldn’t use it in practice. I have a nice home theater system that I like to use for watching movies, TV, and gaming. I don’t ride the bus or do anything mindlessly time consuming where I could use a PSP to watch movies.

I’m with Henning on this… very cool idea… I’ll probably never use it. I used to watch movies on my breaks at work but after getting married I watch most of my films with the wife.

Still that’s selling it a bit short. There have been a handful of times I’ve wished there was an easy way to take a movie with me… but there’s never been an incredibly easy way to do it. Perhaps I’d use it more if it were really offered as a feature.

You know, not to double post… but this is exactly the type of move that Sony needs to make. It’s a good way to keep the PSP brand to the front, without creating another proprietary format that no one really needs/wants. And yes, I realize there’s some irony considering it would be on a Blu-Ray disc… but I said a format no one ‘needs/wants’. I think it’s obvious people want the Blu-Ray.

Plus I’ve got a HUGE desire for them to open up the download store and I’d love to see the crossover to the PSP in that. I’m not sure how they would work it… but I would love to watch TV shows at work on my PSP. The 360 has a movie rental, TV show purchase policy. I wouldn’t really want to rent a movie to my PSP, but nabbing TV shows would be great. I’m really looking for Sony to make this whole digital distribution idea work the way so many people want it too. They have every other piece set up… now they just need to make the service.

But regardless of what they do with the PSN store, this move is something that really sets them apart from the competition in a way that I think the competition wouldn’t be able to compete with.

Well, the PSN store will be on PC (it already is in Japan). Finally sony will have an online store that is bound to work. It seems just to be a matter of allowing content to be posted. Personally, I would have liked sony to have created an Itunes style client, that one could download to not only buy items, but manage the content we own. That however is asking a bit much, considering how bad Sony Japan is a user friendly software.
In fact PSP Media Manager and The XMB itself are the most user friendly software experiences that sony had ever created. Their problem is that they can make something that will work, but it won’t be easy or efficient to use. Just look at the new theme maker for PSP. Not only did it only come out in Japan (even though it defaults to english), but the documentation was sparse. On top of that, the program itself had quirky requirements for not only image type, but the bitrate at which those images are encoded. Instead of just accepting common image file types, they restrict it to a very specific type of file. Sony has always had this problem, its like the software engineers forget that people want things to be simple and easy. The bluray thing will be cool, but given sony’s trackrecord with software, I’ll assume that it will be a convoluted ordeal when implemented.

I’m slowly planning to move the FPS feature over at PS4Blog.net, so that you guys will be able to score some extra points there since we will also slowly have more and more content (and contests!) over there!